wherein we consider the possibilities for participatory approaches to assessment of learning with digital badges, online learning, open courses, MOOCs, and beyond

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Motivating STEM Engagement in Children, Families, and Communities

By Daniel Hickey

This extended post is the second in a series of post about my work with non-profit STEM education start up called Iridescent. In a previous post I describe their Curiosity Machine and an evaluation I carried out of a program designed to encourage families to complete Engineering Design Challenges on that website from home, after attending two-hour weekly evening workshops. In this post I explore the challenges that organizations like Iridescent and science museums face in attempting to motivate inquiry learning in informal contexts. I am also using this post as my weekly contribution to the graduate education class on motivation that I am currently teaching.

In the last year, I have had the
pleasure of working with Iridescent Inc. a science education non-profit in
LA. Iridescent was founded in 2006 by an aerospace engineer named Tara
Chklovski. Tara and her colleagues are bringing three core engineering
design practices (curiosity, creativity, and persistence)
to girls, boys, and families, with a particular focus on underserved
minoritie

Over
the last two years, Iridescent ran a program that worked with parents and
their elementary-age children in two-hour workshops to help them complete
online Design Challenges. Each Design Challenge features
inspiring videos with practicing engineers who exemplify the engineering design
practices while they talk about their work and introduce a handful of more
specific engineering design concepts (such as lift and thrust).
As shown below, the home page of each Design Challenge features a simple
interface that allows even young children to keep track of their progress as
they (a) build a device in an effort to meet a specific engineering design
challenge, (b) post a photo or a video as evidence, (c) get feedback from
virtual mentors, (d) redesign their device, and (e) post a final reflection.
Over 50 Design Challenges are nicely arranged on the Curiosity Machine
website that keeps track of each family's progress. As I elaborated in a recent blog post, I helped Iridescent with a modest evaluation of
a project aimed at helping families engage in inquiry-oriented science
learning.

Home Page of an Engineering Design Challenge on the Curiosity Machine

The weekly workshops were only two
hours long; the real goal was getting families to complete design challenges
from home. The evaluation revealed that only a third of the families
reported submitting Design Challenges from home and fewer still appeared to be
starting them while at home. Because most of the families reported having
Internet access at home, this is mostly likely motivational issue. This raises
a question extends beyond the context of these Design Challenges into the
larger informal science community. For example, what could a museum put up on
the web that might motivate parents and children working together on an
investigation that builds on a special exhibit?

Given busy parents, compelling
videogames, streaming media, social media, and all of the other potential
attractors, this is a not a trivial motivational challenge. This challenge is
heightened by the fact that competing theories of motivation suggest two very
different approaches. In what follows I summarize these two approaches and
offer an alternative based on newer situative theories of motivation that I
have been exploring in my own research.

Applying Traditional Behavioral Models of Motivation

One class of approaches to
motivation follows from tradition behaviorist models of learning. These
approaches would focus on the "contingencies" in the environment that
encourage or discourage children and families from engaging in Design
Challenges from home. These perspectives would examine what likely suggest
some sort of incentives to motivate initial engagement so that each member of
the family would develop fluency with the necessary skills so that they could
learn to work together sufficiently so that the act of mastering the
Design Challenging would itself be a sufficient incentive so that the family
would choose to begin and complete a new challenge from home. This might be a
digital badge that contains evidence of success that families to could share
over social media. This might be free passes to a science museum. While it
seems unlikely, it certainly is worth imagining what sort of engagement would
be motivated by cash incentives.

The nice thing about imagining cash
incentives for learning is because it forces innovators and educators to
consider the criteria for earning the
incentives. Imagine if simply submitting a photo or a video of each device
created in a Design Challenge and posting a reflection would deposit a $100
credit at Amazon. Lots of families would post lots of hastily completed
devices. While some STEM learning might occur, much of the learning that would
take place in those families would be about how to complete the Design
Challenges as quickly as possible while still earning the credit. As nicely
summarized by Paul Chance in (1992) researchers working in the behaviorist tradition
have advanced guidelines for providing incentives to support learning. These
guidelines encourage success-contingent incentives
for meeting a specific criteria and discourage task-contingent incentives for merely completing the task. Recall
that each Design Challenges includes a specific engineering design challenge. For
example, the Suspension Bridge Design Challenge has families make a
suspension bridge from plastic straws, string, and tape that can hold as many
pennies as possible. After some testing, Iridescent might conclude that an
appropriate criterion is 15 pennies. This would make it possible to only offer
the incentive to families who upload a video or photo showing that their device
met that criteria.

Chances article offers a number of
useful guidelines for offering reward. Perhaps the most useful guideline is avoid using rewards as incentives. In other
words, don't offer rewards for things that people are already motivated to do.
Consider, for example, that perhaps parents don't need rewards to engage, but
children do. Perhaps the families might themselves offer some sort of incentive
(e.g., fast food, ice cream, five dollars) to their children for accomplishing
each design challenge. Another useful guideline is use the weakest reward necessary. Clearly a $100 incentive for
families is excessive. What about a $5 credit at the National Science Teachers Association
bookstore?

Other reward guidelines summarized
by Chance include reward at a higher rate
early and then reduce frequency, set standards that are well within reach of
the learners, and reward only the
behavior you want repeated. One feature of the Applied Behavior Analysis
(ABA) research that supports these guidelines is a reliance on single-subject designs. Such studies first
examine baseline behavior. They then adjust the contingencies in the environment
that reward desirable behavior and discourage undesirable behavior. Then the
see what happens. Given that the Design Challenges are served from a very
sophisticated website, it would clearly be possible to systematically tweak the
success criterion and incentives to find which combination leads families to
successfully complete the most Design Challenges.

Once obvious extension to this
approach would be some sort of competition. What if Iridescent put up some sort
of a "leader board" for each Design Challenge? Families could compete
to meet or exceed the current leader. This alone might have a tremendous impact
on family engagement. It is important to note that many strict behaviorists
would argue against using competition. In his famous 1948 book Walden Two, B. F. Skinner argued that
ABA could support a lifestyle free of war, completion, and social strife—much
like Thoreau's Walden. But the continuing
rise of market-oriented models of education and test driven reforms appears to
have led many educators and innovators have to embrace competition.
Additionally the emergence of "gamification" as an entire genre
suggests many possible ways to gamify individual Design Challenges and the
entire Curiosity Machine experience. Indeed proponents of gamification would
likely suggest turning the Curiosity Machine into some sort of virtual STEM Family Feud.

The Debate over Rewards

A very different set of suggestions
would follow from rationalist theories that came to dominate studies of
learning and motivation after the "cognitive revolution" in the
1960s. This perspective argues against the use of "extrinsic"
incentives to motivate family engagement. These perspectives argue that
extrinsic rewards undermine the authentic learning that occurs as humans
naturally try to make sense of the world around them. These assumptions are
consistent with "constructivst" and "discovery
learning" perspectives that came to dominate educational psychology in the
1980 and that are particularly influential in STEM education.

This perspective has been widely
popularized by the writer Alfie Kohn, via book such as his Punished by
Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other
Bribes from 1993. In his 1993 response to Paul Chance, Kohn summarizes
widely held concerns over the use of rewards for learning. These include that
that rewards are controlling, ineffective, make learning less appealing, and ignore curricular questions. A major issue with rewards is the
"overjustification" effect documented in hundreds of studies. This
occurs when free-choice intrinsically motivated behavior decreases after the
introduction of rewards. This debate has continued to simmered for decades. The
opening sentence of Chance's (1993) response to Kohn's response nicely captures
the disjoint between these two perspectives:

IT IS DIFFICULT to know how to
respond to Alfie Kohn's critique. It is so disjointed and so full of
misrepresentations of fact and theory that it is like a greased pig: one can
scarcely get a grip on it, let alone wrestle it to the ground.

A series of meta-analyses were carried out on empirical
studies of rewards in the mid-90s. In meta-analyses, the size and nature of the
experimental effect across various conditions are themselves subjected to
rigorous statistical analysis. While meta-analysis intended to resolve such
enduring questions, a set of competing meta-analyses reaching opposite
conclusions has only confirmed how irreconcilable these two perspectives are.

Supporting
Intrinsically Motivated STEM Engagement

Kohn and many other opponents
of rewards draw on primarily on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), as defined by
Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and colleagues in the 1970s and which continues to
be very influential. SDT incorporates Bandura's prior ideas about of
modeling and self-effiacy in a much broader framework of innate human needs. As
nicely summarized in Wikipedia, the
theory focuses on three needs:

Competence concerns the assumption that humans
universally seek to control outcomes and experience mastery.

Autonomy concerns
the universal urge to be causal agents of one's own life and act in harmony
with ones integrated self (though not
necessarily independent of others)

Relatedness concerns
the universal want to interact, be connected with, and experience caring for
others.

Applying these theories would highlight the many things
that Iridescent is already doing right to motivate families to encourage
intrinsically motivated engagement in the Design Challenges, and suggest
further refinements. Specifically, the three primary implications of SDT
concern optimal challenge, performance feedback, and supporting
relatedness. STD would argue
against using rewards and competition, and instead suggest focusing on each of
these three areas:

Optimal challenge: SDT argues the learning
opportunities should be neither too easy nor too hard. If they are too
easy learners don't feel a sense of accomplishment; if they are too hard,
learners will have insufficient self-efficacy to engage. What I love about
the Design Challenges is that they appear to be just hard enough so that
younger children need help accomplishing the challenge. More specifically, the
younger children need help in using the disciplinary concepts (such
as load and tension) introduced in the videos to systematically
(rather than randomly) redesign their devices to accomplish the challenge.

Offer useful performance feedback. SDT provides extensive guidelines in giving
performance feedback, and it has been widely applied in the realm of classroom
assessment and grading. The reason Kohn included praise in the title of
his book is because of studies showing that teacher praise for behavior that is
"externally-regulated" (rather than intrinsically motivated)
undermines self-determination. This is one area where Iridescent might
do quite a bit of refinement and research. The prior study showed the most of
the feedback from virtual mentors was received by learners at least a day after
they had submitted their challenge, long after the materials and devices were
put away and some of the families had embarked on a new challenge. So further
refinement to both the technology and practices for providing feedback to make
that feedback more useful and used would be expected to improve engagement.

Help learners relate
to others. I think that Iridescent is already doing a great job with this
in the way that their challenges are designed. As I elaborated in my other
post, in my one opportunity to observe families completing Design Challenges it
was really endearing to watch a father gently but persistently use the
principle of thrust to help his
daughters redesign their "spinning machines" (made of a balloon,
clay, straws, and a ping pong ball). I regret that it was so noisy in the room
that I could not transcribe the recording, but got to witness the younger child
use that term herself in talking to her sister. From my perspective, this kind
of scientific relating is what is missing in many science classrooms. While I
think Iridescent's intuitions have been remarkably effective, I suspect a more
systematic application of SDT might point to additional innovations that might
motivate engagement. For example, right now most of the relatedness that is
supported appears to be within
families. It might be very helpful search for strategies to foster relatedness between families.

As we see here, SDT offers clear suggestions for increasing
intrinsic motivation and the high quality forms of engagement that have long
been shown to follow. Many of these are included in sub-theory of SDT known as Cognitive Evaluation Theory. CET
provides a practical framework for studying how social and environmental
factors support or undermine intrinsic motivation. Most importantly, these
principles would steer Iridescent away from any sort of incentives or
completion, as these are assumed to undermine intrinsically motivated
engagement.

The challenge here is obvious.
One set of motivational theories pushes in one direction, while another set of
theories pushes in another. Because rationalist theories have long dominated
educational and developmental psychology, teachers and parents are strongly
discourage from using rewards. But schools continue to be dominated by grades
and parents quickly learn that rewards and punishments appear to work. The
problem is that teachers and parents are likely to use rewards and punishment
in ways that even behaviorists would discourage. This problem seems to be
getting worse in schools with the rise of market-oriented approaches to
educational reform.

A Situative
Alternative

I have been
fascinated by this tension between behaviorist and rationalist perspectives for
my entire career. I first explored in the major area paper that wrote in 1993
in order to advance to candidacy in my PhD program. In that paper I argued that
the sociocultural theories of cognition and learning first articulately by
Vygotsky in the 1930s offered an alternative view for thinking about
motivation. I had read Lave and Wenger's 1991 book on Situated Learning and was intrigued that this emerging theory might "sidestep"
these nagging tensions over incentive. Thanks to the encouragement and patient
editing of Paul Pintrich, the paper was eventually published in Educational
Psychologist in 1997. That paper helped me land my first academic position and was
nicely taken up by the new scholarly community that was emerging at that time.

The 1997 article
led to invitations participate in several symposia. These included on one in
Sweden in 2000 that Simone Volet and Sanna Jarvela organized. The papers from
that symposium led to an edited volume in 2001 that gave this new community a name:
Motivation in Learning Context. This
name reflects a larger shift in Educational Psychology that had begun in the
late 1980s. Rather than applying basic theories that were first advanced by
Cognitive Psychologists and Developmental Psychologist, educational researchers
were increasingly interested in developing more useful "local"
theories in particular educational contexts. Generally speaking, this shift is
what continues to distinguish the research associated with the Learning
Sciences from Educational Psychology.

Around this
time, I also began collaborating with Mary
McCaslin, including a chapter that explored
her theory of "co-regulated learning." My real opportunity
came in in 2003 when Mary invited me to contribute to a special issue of The Elementary School Journal that she was
editing. I got to really explore the motivation implications of
"situative" theories of cognition that Jim Greeno and others had
formalized in the 1990s. The title of the article included Greeno's notion of
"engaged participation" as well as one of the most embarrassing (of
many) typos in my work. While Mary asked me to "tone down" my
argument, she allowed me to bypass some of the issues that one of the reviewers
had with my "stridently situative" approach. The paper explored six
aspects of engagement, and their implications for the design of learning
environments. What follows is an initial exploration of their implications for Iridescent's
goal of motivating extended family engagement completing Design Challenges from
home.

Internalization of goals and values. My
first point was simply an extension of situative theories of cognition. These
theories argue that knowledge primarily resides
in social context and only secondarily in
the minds of individuals. If we assume that this is true, then we can extend
that assumption to the goals and value that motivate engagement and learning.
While we obviously internalize goals and value from the context around us,
assuming that they primarily live in the social context pushes us to focus on
the social and cultural context for ways motivate engagement.
In the case of
Iridescent, this would lead to assume that most of goals and values that motivate
the children actually come from their family, while most of the goals and
values that motivate the family come from that larger sociocultural context in
which that family functions. At general level, this means that Iridescent's
efforts to motivate should be organized in terms of communityà
family à
child rather than the other way around. At a more specific level this suggest
the need for systematic ethnographic work that examines how the larger cultural
context motivates families to engage in scientific and how families motivate
their children to engage. Brigid Barron at Stanford is doing some
reallyi nteresting studies in this regard and could probably have some good
ideas about what this would look like around family engagement in Design
Challenges. I also just discovered what looks like a really nice paper by Middleton, Dupuis, & Tang (2013) that looks very promising as well.

Engaged participation. Building particularly on Greeno's 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, there seems to be unique value in characterizing engagement as meaningful participation in a context
where to-be-learned knowledge is value and used. If participation in scientific
inquiry is not value by the family, the Design Challenges will be hard pressed
to motivate the children; likewise, if scientific inquiry is not valued by the
larger sociocultural context in which the family participates, Iridescent has
its work cut out for it. Of course this gets at why Iridescent, the National
Science Foundation and other foundations and museum work so hard to reach out
to women, racial minorities and other communities who continue to face
significant obstacles such as sexism, racism and impoverishment in their
pursuit of STEM education and careers. The design challenges already do a great
job by emphasizing female and racial minority engineers in their videos and
then offering their evening workshops in schools and libraries that serve
inner-city and low income communities. One idea is that having one of those
engineers actually come to the family science workshops might be really motivating
for families and children. What might be very compelling would be having those
same engineers serve as virtual mentors, particularly if the children and
parents strongly identified with the visiting engineers.

The role of identity in engagement. The role of identity is crucial
to engaged participation. While identity has traditionally been characterized
in terms of internalized goals and values, situative perspective characterize
identity in terms of our lived experience of participation in the social and
cultural practices of communities. Such identities are negotiated and are
assumed to reside primarily in those negotiations and only secondarily in the
minds of the individual or the members of a particular community. In
Iridescent's case this means self-report survey methods (like those that we
used in the prior evaluation) capture a view of identity that is at best
incomplete and possibly quite misleading. Rather, interpretive and
observational methods are needed to study the way identities are negotiated
between children and families and between families and communities. These
negotiations are also carried out around displays of competence and recognition
of that competence by the community. This means for example, that it is
important to help children and families learn to use the disciplinary concepts
(e.g., load and tension) introduced in the design challenges in ways that would be
recognized as appropriate by STEM professionals.

Legitimate peripheral participation. Lave and Wenger introduced the
notion of peripheral participation in 1991 to capture the importance of trajectories of participation. As
children and families negotiate their participation in the larger community of
STEM expertise, they can do so in ways that define very different trajectories.
Obviously, they are "peripheral" participants since they are not
practicing scientists and engineers. Legitimate
participation on the periphery defines an "inbound" trajectory.
This means that as children and families participate more and more
successfully, they are getting closer and closer to the community of practice.
This further argues for supporting authentic use of disciplinary concepts in
the design challenges. Rationalist "constructivist" models of
instruction argue against explicit instruction on such concepts, particularly
in informal settings. As elaborated above, these perspectives argue that overly
explicit instruction will undermine the child's natural curiosity that will
lets them discover what those concepts mean. From a situative perspective, it
is more important to help children and families to understand and use those
concepts in ways that experts would consider appropriate, in order to begin
building an "legitimate" trajectory from the periphery towards the
center of the STEM professional community. This perspective also suggests that many
kinds of informal assessments can actually be quite motivating, so long as
individuals are prepared for them and learners are able to succeed. For
example, these theories suggest that a simple quiz that children would be asked
to complete on their own (without their parents help) that lets children
demonstrate their newly gained proficiency with the concepts that they mastered
while completing the design challenges could have a substantial impact on most
children's nascent identity as a future STEM professional.

The importance of non-participation. Wenger's
1998 book on Communities of Practice helped
me appreciate that the things we don't participate
in define our identities just as much as what we do participate in. It helped
me realize that in many STEM classroom students are not really participating in
authentic STEM inquiry at all. As researchers like Leona Shauble and others
have shown repeatedly, the only inquiry in many STEM classroom is figuring out
how to get a good grade for the least amount of work. While STEM educators and
parents often blame students for this, this perspective lays the blame squarely
on the curriculum (and inappropriate use of tests of the learning from that
curriculum). Consider the trajectory defined by what critics call
"worksheet science." Students who participate more and more
successfully in memorizing and recognizing shallow definitions of terms and
completing simple procedure are unlikely to every find themselves in the center
of a particular community of STEM practice.

A Personal
Application

Mark Guzdial

These issues of trajectories and
non-participation in STEM learning have personal relevance for me and my own family. I was quite pleased a few years ago when my son Lucas enrolled in a computer
programming class in high school. I never learned to program myself and these
days it I find it quite a handicap. While I bought an Apple II+ computer in
1982 (!) and taught myself BASIC, an instructional technology professor discouraged
me from delving too deeply into technology or programming (because "it
changes too often"). While I still want to learn how to code, my non-participation
in programming clearly helped define my trajectory towards a Ph.D in Psychology
and satisfying career as a Learning Scientist.

Unfortunately, the curriculum in my
son's programming class was like the typical secondary computer science
instruction that Mark Guzdial chronicles in his Computing Education blog. The coding
worksheets seemed to have been haphazardly created to match various videos
located on the web. My son wanted to use the much more professionally-produced videos and
exercises that we were able to access via my university's account at Lynda.com,
but his teacher insisted that my son complete the worksheets as well (so teacher
could grade them).

After failing the first exam (which
appeared to directly mirror the worksheets), my son dropped the programming class
and instead enrolled in Journalism. His journalism teacher and curriculum were
both outstanding and my son quickly developed into a strong writer. He was soon
taking a turn each month on the weekly School
Diary a monthly column in the local newspaper. As many of my friends and
comments on the newspaper website pointed out, he seemed more thoughtful about
topics like climate and college tuition than many politicians. His columns
often sparked fierce debates on the paper's website. His class even elected him
to represent the school newspaper at debate between the two candidates in
Bloomington's 2015 mayoral race. The debate was moderated by the publisher of
the local paper and the other panelists included a political science professor
and reporter from the paper.

Lucas will be attending IU this
fall and currently plans on majoring in Journalism and Political Science. Just as my own career
trajectory was shaped by my own non-participation in programming, it seems
quite likely that my son's trajectory has already been shaped in much the same
fashion. Of course, as the child of two university professors, my son had
opportunities and advantages that are unfathomable to most of the families that
Iridescent targets in their programs. I think it is massively important to
increase the number of children who establish a legitimate trajectory towards
STEM careersearly on, and particularly do so for children of growing up in impoverished
families. I think this is particularly important for mathematics and science. For
many impoverished children, secondary-level math and science courses present
such an obstacle that they never even get into college, much less STEM careers.
I believe that Iridescent is on the right track to transforming these trajectories,
and would love to see many more such efforts. (Here is a previous post about our initial efforts to fix this problem in freshman Calculus)

Putting it all
Together

So what should Iridescent do? As
we saw above, the guidelines from behaviorist and rationalist perspectives were
both quite straightforward routes going in two very different directions. However,
one frustration that many skeptics have with these newer situative perspectives
is that they are just that: perspectives. In contrast to the prior
perspectives, situative and sociocultural perspectives fail to deliver straightforward
prescriptive guidelines that promise to result in desired ways of behaving or
thinking that are independent of context. In a subsequent post, I will elaborate
on one possible path forward.

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about this blog

New models of learning and new digital technologies require new approaches to assessment. We explore and discuss new approaches to assessment, with a particular focus on participatory approaches, digital badges, learning recognition networks, ePortfolios, and eCredentialing.

about these bloggers

Daniel T. Hickey, Professor of Learning Sciences, Research Scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University, and leader of the Participatory Assessment Lab. You can email him at dthickey@indiana.edu and visit his academic profile at http://education.indiana.edu/hickey

Christopher D. Andrews, who taught CTE classes in Utah for 7 years and has a MA in Teacher Education from Brigham Young University, is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. He is interested in how technology impacts assessment in education, participatory learning and practices in teacher education, and improving media literacy for all learners.

Rebecca C. Itow, a former California high school English teacher, is a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. She researches educator professional development in participatory spaces and the ways in which assessment choices impact learner engagement. Learn more about Rebecca and read her blog at rebeccaitow.com.